Benjamin Saurer

About

Pilar Corrias Gallery is delighted to present the London debut of Berlin-based artist Benjamin Saurer. Benjamin Saurer creates minutely-crafted, luminously-coloured canvases depicting subjects whose ideologies give them a purity of spirit in contrast to the corrupt nature of their surrounding world. Created methodically and meditatively, Saurer's scenes emerge through poetic veils of paint and batik, yet the graceful and seductive elegance of Saurer's paintings belies the critique of ideological corruption at the heart of their content. Conceiving of his works in relation to the satirical compositional structure of an Offenbach operetta, Saurer seeks to explore binary oppositions between cynicism and sincerity, and ignorance and knowledge. Working with subjects and titles appropriated from pedagogical tracts, local newspapers, or Lutheran catechisms the artist drains provocative imagery of its meaning bringing his subjects to a state of inane neutrality through the intricate technique he employs. The exhibition of new works at Pilar Corrias Gallery will be the very first solo presentation of Saurer's extraordinary paintings. Benjamin Saurer was born in Offenbach, Germany in 1977. Originally trained as an organist, Saurer practiced church music from 1997 to 2003 and received his MFA from Städelschule, Academy of Fien Art Frankfurt am Main in 2008. Saurer's work came to prominence following its inclusion in T2, Fifty Moons of Saturn The Second Torino Triennale (2008) for which the artist received widespread critical acclaim. Recent exhibitions of Saurer's work include: What is not but could be if (Part 2), Neue Alte brücke, Frankfurt am Main (2009); Art Cologne (2007); Schnittraum, Cologne (2007); ECAM — Le Jardin, Gattières (2007) and Kunsthalle Darmstadt (2006). Benjamin Saurer lives and works in Berlin.